The Nick Adams Stories

Needless to say, Ernest Hemingway's sudden suicide left his literary estate in great disarray, prompting a flood of posthumous releases (one count totaled more than 300 unpublished manuscripts at the time of his death). Although many of these releases have been curiosities rightly swept beneath the sands of time, The Nick Adams Stories have, thankfully, endured. These 24 stories first published together in 1972 offer a version of Hemingway known as Nick Adams. Arranged chronologically to follow Nick's life, they offer a rare look into Hemingway's early twentieth-century middle America, which makes a fine comparison to his better-known accounts of Europe. Rather than Hemingway's familiar revolutionaries and Lost Generation Parisians here we see rail-riding hobos, Chicago gangsters, and, of course, one Nick Adams, trying to come to terms with the chaos and emptiness of a rural America turning modern. Set mostly in the still-unsettled upper Michigan, these stories can be grisly, as with "Three Shots" where a Native American wife gets a C-section, only to have her own throat slit by her husband. Yet others, like "Big Two-Hearted River," are in the best tradition of Hemingway's stoic pastoralism, where the titular river allows Hemingway to elegant portray the dark recesses of Nick's mind. Another standout is "The Killers," which charts Nick's abrupt coming-of-age during a Chicago gangland murder and about which Hemingway himself said, "That story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote." While not quite as good as Hemingway's wartime novels, this solid, satisfying collection nonetheless fills a gap in the writer's oeuvre and has let a few more of Papa's short masterpieces see the light of day.